In the world of social media marketing and social selling, different social platforms are more or less relevant to different business types. While it is important for both B2B and B2C companies to have a vibrant social presence on all popular networks, the key to a cost-effective social strategy is to allocate resources towards the most prospective platforms for your business. This strategy helps you minimize marketing and sales spending while maximizing conversion potential.
In the B2B world specifically, LinkedIn has long been the best platform to source talent, clients, and partners, and will remain the best platform to achieve these goals in 2023 and beyond. There are many short, mid, and long-term goals you can achieve for your brand and sales objectives with a sound LinkedIn strategy, but with such a competitive and saturated network, you need a specific, comprehensive approach.
Here’s what you need to implement into your LinkedIn sales strategy to achieve better results throughout 2023.
Start With a Comprehensive Prospecting Plan
Prospecting is the foundational pillar of B2B sales, particularly on LinkedIn where you must be very careful how, when, and whom you approach. Keep in mind that business leaders and decision-makers on LinkedIn are constantly bombarded by DMs and offers, so you not only need to stand out from the rest, but also take a calculated approach to individual prospecting.
Before you can start writing prospecting messages, reaching out, and following up with potential clients and customers, you need to develop a prospecting plan on your end, by:
- Creating the ideal B2B customer profiles
- Making a list of target accounts
- Analyzing activity and researching prospects on and off platform
- Narrowing down your potential prospects
- Identifying the best communication methods for reaching out to each prospect
Careful planning and research will make B2B sales prospecting on LinkedIn seamless and straightforward and will allow your sales and marketing teams to achieve better results with minimal time waste. Once you have researched prospects thoroughly, create an outreach strategy and optimize your LinkedIn funnel.
Building a Powerful Outreach Approach
Effective LinkedIn outreach relies on numerous supporting factors and processes, including prospect research, proposal and communication modeling, and trial and error. In addition to all these factors, you must also be able to stand out with your UVP and brand experience. If you successfully bring these pieces together, you will create an outreach template and approach that will capture your prospects’ attention and inspire them to reply.
Developing value-driven LinkedIn outreach proposals relies on your sales team truly understanding the key pain points, needs, and goals of your prospects. Your marketing and sales teams, therefore, have to not only research their LinkedIn accounts, but gather valuable insights from their blog posts, other social networks, partners and customers, and industry and market trends.
Your team will then be able to craft unique LinkedIn messages to start a sales-oriented conversation. A sales-oriented message, when executed in a personalized way, will inspire a positive response, but an overtly sales-oriented template message will immediately push prospects away.
Create and Optimize a LinkedIn Funnel
Typically, you will create two main funnels: a sales funnel and a marketing funnel. Go deeper by creating various custom funnels for different sales and marketing touchpoints across the web. This investment and attention to detail will allow you to outperform your competitors – especially on hyper-competitive platforms like LinkedIn.
It is prudent, therefore, to create a LinkedIn funnel as well. If you’re in the SaaS sector, align your SaaS sales funnel with the needs and goals of your LinkedIn prospects to optimize the buyer’s journey through LinkedIn and adapt your approach to the different stages of the funnel. After all, not everyone is at the same stage in the funnel, so personalizing your approach for every prospect is key.
Some prospects will already be acquainted with your brand, which will allow you to guide them from Awareness into the Engagement and Consideration stages. On the other hand, you will also come into contact with prospects who are completely unaware of your existence, so your priority will be to build awareness and gradually inspire genuine interest.
Sync Your Marketing and Sales Teams
LinkedIn selling is, contrary to what the term implies, not just about using sales tactics to achieve your goals. Yes, the goal is to sell, but to boost LinkedIn conversions and retain customers over the long term you must utilize the power of both your marketing and sales team. Sync these teams and create a unified sales-marketing project for LinkedIn specifically to allow these experts to work together towards a common goal.
Needless to say, such a centralized approach will deliver much better results than leaving your teams to their own devices. Syncing your sales and marketing experts on your LinkedIn strategy requires setting up communication tools and an intranet system for seamless communication, collaboration tools, shared schedules, and calendars. These tools help sales and marketing work together seamlessly and sync their strategies.
Your sales experts will gain invaluable information from your marketing staff on LinkedIn trends and the behavior and needs of different prospects. Your marketers will get valuable instructions from sales experts on how to align their messaging for different prospects and help nurture them towards conversion.
Ensuring these teams work together will take your LinkedIn strategy forward across the board.
Organize and Manage Prospects with the Right Tools
We can’t discuss social selling or specifically B2B selling on LinkedIn without talking about the need to automate certain processes and to use the right tools for everything from prospecting to nurturing and closing. While you’re not going to use automated software to close customers, you are going to use a tool to help sales experts close them by having the right data on hand.
For your marketers and sales experts, the most important tool is a comprehensive CRM system with LinkedIn integration capabilities so they can organize and manage all prospects and collaborate on every stage of the funnel. This tool ensures they deliver tailored messaging both on the sales and the marketing side.
Other tools include a LinkedIn scheduler and an automated posting system. You can also use an automated reach-out tool but only for prospect clusters. For example, you can automatically deliver direct messaging to prospects via templates, however, you must still optimize these messages for specific prospect types and their location in your funnel.
Use Community Managers and Marketers for Engagement
Utilizing the right talent is a key piece of a successful LinkedIn sales strategy. Without a doubt, you need experienced salespeople to converse with and nurture potential customers towards conversion. You also need various other experts to fill a supporting role.
You should, for example, use community managers to support the goals of the sales department for specific prospect clusters. These experts align their engagement tactics and focus to deliver a better experience to different audiences on LinkedIn, guiding conversations towards resolving specific issues.
When you hire a PPC expert ensure that their strategy aligns with what the sales and marketing teams are trying to achieve on LinkedIn. Make sure that the ads your prospects are seeing on LinkedIn are in line with your organic posts and the conversations your sales experts have with prospects.
This brings us to the next important point.
Consider Adding LinkedIn Ads Into the Mix
Social media advertising might be the responsibility of the marketing department, but that doesn’t mean that sales and even customer support should not be involved. Just like marketing activities boost your sales potential and everything you do on LinkedIn to convert prospects, remember that your sales experts boost the effectiveness of your ad campaigns.
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Both the sales and customer support teams bring invaluable insight about customer and LinkedIn trends to the table, which the marketers can use to deliver a next-level advertising experience. When it comes to paid ads vs organic social media, it’s important to note that both are powerful conversion tools that must work together. Moreover, these marketing tactics need to support your sales processes.
Again, it comes down to the funnel. Consider where different prospects are on their journey through the funnel, and target advertising to deliver high-value messaging based on their pain-points and goals.
Manage and Improve Your Online Reputation
Reputation management is a key component of social selling. Leverage your reputation to inspire interested replies based on what the online world thinks of you. You can be sure that when you reach out to prospects on LinkedIn, they will research you thoroughly before they decide to reply with a positive or a negative answer.
Your brand’s reputation is the difference between starting a conversation and getting a quick “no thank you”, so build and nurture a positive brand image. This fact not only means you should polish your image on LinkedIn, but also that you should nurture a positive reputation across the web.
When people google you, you don’t want them to come across any negative sentiment. You can remove a negative result in search by contacting the people who posted something negative about your brand, and turn negative reviews into success stories by resolving issues quickly.
This strategy ensures that when prospects decide to research you, they come across a stellar brand image.
Use Engaging Content to Build Your LinkedIn Brand
Content marketing on LinkedIn is another powerful method of supporting your sales staff and their objectives. Its primary goal is to generate leads and build brand authority, but you can and should align your content creation strategy to help sales experts nurture their prospects.
Remember that syncing your marketing and sales teams is among one of the key LinkedIn tips, because your sales experts need to feed information to your content marketers about specific prospects and their needs. This strategy allows creatives to optimize your LinkedIn posts, adapt the posting schedule, and even create better messaging for DMs and future follow-ups.
Your content marketers, copywriters, and creatives in general are crucial for sales on LinkedIn.
Develop a Killer Follow-Up Strategy
You probably know that the sales process on LinkedIn is rarely going to stay on the platform. At some point you’re going to take your prospects off-platform to your website, engage with them in follow-up emails, schedule video calls, and take a number of key steps to nurture them to conversion.
Therefore, in order to sell through LinkedIn, you must align everything you do on the platform with your other marketing and sales tactics. For example, when you’re nurturing a prospect on LinkedIn, at some point you’ll use a personalized sales email template to follow up with an offer or a request to meet. Needless to say, you need to optimize that email exclusively for the individual to deliver as much value as possible.
Keep in mind that follow-ups go beyond emails, and that you need to align your website content, landing pages, and other forms of communication with their needs.
Use of LinkedIn For B2B Sales
Building a winning B2B sales strategy on LinkedIn goes beyond reaching out with template messages and delves into meticulous planning, pitch personalization and prospecting, and powerful follow-ups and prospect nurturing.These practices are a small part of your overarching LinkedIn strategy.
Start implementing these tips and tactics into your LinkedIn sales plan to create a winning approach and surpass your LinkedIn sales and marketing goals in 2023.